=95

A poster film for Black Lives Matter, Jordan Peele’s horror-satire of white vampirism gleefully needles America’s racial malaise.

=95

Buster Keaton’s most lavish production and his warmest, bringing together a boy, a girl and a train amid the maelstrom of the US Civil War.

=95

Ousmane Sembène lifts the mask on France’s racist post-colonial relationship with Senegal in his small yet commanding feature debut.

=95

A work that defies straightforward understanding and suggests understandability may be overrated.

=95

Sergio Leone’s operatic widescreen elegy to the old American West, with the forces of corporate capitalism coming down the railroad.

=95

This prison-break study is Robert Bresson at his most starkly essential: a man, four walls, his ingenuity and the mysterious inflections of fate.

=90

Max Ophuls’ woozy whirligig tracks a pair of unwanted earrings around high-society Paris – until they bear the weight of lost time and passion.

=90

Luchino Visconti’s sumptuous epic portrays the fall of 19th-century Sicilian nobility, its decadent displays of wealth tinged with melancholy.

=90

Kenji Mizoguchi’s bewitching, insinuating Edo-period ghost story renders civil war as a parable of heedless male greed.

=90

Urban anomie and multi-generational growing pains are given rich, relaxed expression in Edward Yang’s heartfelt Taipei family tapestry.

=90

Like Get Out, Bong Joon Ho’s endlessly twisty, blackly sincere class-war thriller is a pop provocation for our unequal times.

=88

A sense of wistful, romantic longing joins the two stories in Wong Kar Wai’s freewheeling portmanteau portrait of Hong Kong.

=88

Stanley Kubrick’s much analysed and often spoofed psychological horror spends a chilling and claustrophobic winter at the empty Overlook Hotel.

=84

The apotheosis of Jean-Luc Godard’s experimental era, this sprawling essay film indicts the 20th century through its most popular medium.

=84

Jean-Luc Godard’s most effervescent escapade, a primary-coloured lovers-on-the-run blow-out heading south with Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

=84

Victor Erice’s exquisite impressionistic distillation of childhood fear and wonder in the ruins of the recently ended Spanish Civil War.

=84

David Lynch’s adult fairytale follows teen sleuth Kyle MacLachlan’s murder inquiry into the surreal, perverse corners of small-town America.

=78

Jacques Rivette’s most playful, innovative frolic, in which his irreverent Parisian heroines dissolve worlds, genres, social codes and boundaries.

=78

Love is rescued from the jaws of the afterlife in the Archers’ delirious World War II air-pilot fantasia.

=78

Industrial modernity proves mercilessly madcap in Charlie Chaplin’s final (mostly) silent feature, one of the most inspired and ingenious of all his comedies.

=78

Young love and teen delinquency in Taiwan’s early 1960s adolescence, in Edward Yang’s slow-burn, bittersweet epic.

=78

As timely as ever in its grim poeticisation of demagogues and doom, helplessness and hope. If music be the food of death, play on.

=78

Tinseltown’s greatest self-satire, a gothic requiem for big-screen bygones and the highs of screen stardom.

=75

Kenji Mizoguchi’s tragic folk saga of the tribulations of an exiled governor’s family in feudal Japan, tracked with exquisitely moving camerawork.

=75

Douglas Sirk’s melodrama holds a mirror to the hypocrisies of 1950s America with its pairs of mothers and daughters across class and racial divides.

=75

Hayao Miyazaki’s rich anime fantasy follows its ten-year-old heroine into the labyrinth of a spirit-world bathhouse, teeming with phantoms and peril.

=72

The storytelling is as simple as Totoro is inscrutable, unfolding in a series of delightful, exquisitely constructed sequences.

=72

Roberto Rossellini’s plaintively simple portrait of a marriage on the rocks, imprinted with the ghosts of love, cultures and civilisations.

=72

Michelangelo Antonioni’s high-modernist breakthrough sends Monica Vitti in search less of her disappeared friend than her own self, via images to get lost in.

=67

Fritz Lang’s bombastic, stylised depiction of a future of profound inequality has influenced generations of genre filmmakers.

=67

Agnès Varda’s essay portrait of society ’s scavenger-recyclers – herself included – is both free-radical and infectious.

=67

The feverish Technicolor and astonishing ballet sequences for which this film is so renowned are as spellbinding as they are disturbing.

=67

The rare short film in this list, Marker’s dazzling photo montage ruminates on memory from beyond the apocalypse.

=67

Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic portrait of a medieval artist may be the most wrenching depiction of belief, creativity and the search for meaning ever filmed.

66

A restless young couple dream of escaping Senegal for Paris in Djibril Diop Mambéty ’s stylish, poetic, irreverent expression of post-colonial fantasies.

=63

Ingrid Bergman rallies Humphrey Bogart’s embittered cynic to the anti-Nazi cause in this classic romance.

=63

Joseph Cotten chases Orson Welles’s agent of corruption through the ruins of divided post-war Vienna in this evocative classic thriller.

=63

The dizzying story of wiseguy Henry Hill, from his seduction into a life of crime to his paranoid, cocaine-fuelled departure.

=60

Julie Dash’s visionary visual marriage between Afrocentric aesthetics and the rich emotional depth of Black womanhood is a cinematic triumph.

=60

Instantly heralded as a modern masterpiece, Barry Jenkins’ stunning three-part story of queer identity is both a technical and an emotional marvel.

=60

Federico Fellini’s ode to Rome presents a lush, vibrant exterior to the swinging city, before revealing its rotting moral core.

59

Chris Marker’s speculative travelogue-essay, reflecting on culture and history in narrated letters from Guinea to Japan to Iceland.

=54

Buster Keaton’s would-be sleuth dreams himself into movie-heroic mastery in this dazzling, evergreen, meta masterpiece of silent comedy.

=54

Billy Wilder’s then-risqué romcom, with Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine finding love amid corporate New York’s sea of sexual deception.

=54

Sergei Eisenstein’s renowned agit-drama of proto-revolutionary mutiny and repression, often quoted but still powerful in its montage effects.

=54

Iconic neo-noir in a befouled sci-fi Los Angeles where humans and their machine replicas vie to be predators rather than prey.

=54

Disillusion in love and cinema in Jean-Luc Godard’s most opulent and emotive production, with lovers and film legends at loggerheads in Capri.

=52

Chantal Akerman’s epistolary film, shot in the grime of 70s New York, bridges the distance from Brussels through dictated letters from her mother.

=52

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s heart-on-sleeve melodrama of a doomed romance across racial and age divides probes social hypocrisy with feeling.

=50

This virtuoso drama of a mute woman’s and her daughter’s silent defiance of patriarchy in 19th-century New Zealand still has searing emotional heft.

=50

François Truffaut’s free-wheeling debut, with Jean-Pierre Léaud as his rebel-schoolboy surrogate, is still a banner film for nouvelle vague lyric realism.

=48

Barbara Loden’s tough, unsentimental portrait of a woman adrift in the industrial heartlands of the north-eastern United States.

=48

An austere parable on the power of faith, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s penultimate film culminates in a transcendent resurrection scene.

=45

Insouciant big-screen thrill-games from the Master of Suspense, hounding Cary Grant’s smug adman across a continent’s span of peerless set pieces.

=45

A window on Algeria’s wider liberation war, recreating a violent phase of guerrilla struggle and suppression in powerful free-documentary style.

=45

Stanley Kubrick’s meticulously designed epic recounts the picaresque exploits of an 18th-century Irish adventurer.

=43

Charles Burnett’s tender and witty tale of a disillusioned slaughterhouse worker and the solace to be found in the simplest moments of life.

=43

Two men recruit a guide to take them into ‘the Zone’, a mysterious realm where one’s innermost wishes come true, in this metaphysical sci-fi epic.

=41

The film that brought Japanese cinema to the world, this 88-minute firecracker proved a seminal assault on the notion of objectivity.

=41

The film that topped our inaugural poll in 1952, Vittorio De Sica’s indelible neorealist parable offers a sharp-eyed portrait of Italy ’s post-war privations.

=38

The Master of Suspense ratchets up the tension while dishing out insights into obsession, urban living and the dangers of the gaze.

=38

Billy Wilder’s supreme gender-bending comedy has Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as female-posing musicians on the lam, and many knickers in a twist.

=38

Jean-Luc Godard’s cock-of-the-walk calling card, mixing pulp pastiche and upstart rebellion with Jean-Paul Belmondo’s footloose Parisian delinquent.

=36

Fritz Lang’s rack-taut first talkie, with a searing, animalistic Peter Lorre as a serial child-murderer turned manhunt target.

=36

A purely beautiful outing from the Tramp, this delightful urban romance features one of cinema’s most heartbreaking smiles.

35

All the mischief, discoveries, joys and tragedies of life are given endlessly lyrical expression in Satyajit Ray’s debut, the first entry in ‘The Apu Trilogy’.

34

Jean Vigo’s headily poetic portrait of young newlyweds on – and off – Michel Simon’s barge on the Seine.

=31

Alfred Hitchcock’s unsparing wrong-motel shocker starring Janet Leigh is a watershed for mainstream horror and still seminal in its suspense games.

=31

Cinema scaled new heights of visual poetry in this deeply personal, elliptical film by the master of ‘sculpting in time’.

=31

Federico Fellini’s portrait of the film director as harried ringmaster and unreliable dreamer, spinning gold from his memories and fantasies.

30

Portrait of a Lady on Fire demonstrates Céline Sciamma’s ability to make a timelessly beautiful film that also crystallises the gender politics of her era.

29

Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s high-art vigilante movie for fallen times, with a coiled Robert De Niro as psycho-saviour of an infernal NYC.

28

This feminist milestone is an anarchic comedy of subversion whose approach to montage is as exuberant as the film’s two protagonists.

27

To make sense of the 20th century’s most horrific atrocity, Claude Lanzmann reinvented documentary itself, giving the form colossal new significance.

=25

Actor Charles Laughton’s only film as director, starring Robert Mitchum as an implacable child-hunting preacher, still leaves an indelible mark.

=25

Robert Bresson gave us a typically stark vision of humanity as experienced by a put-upon, maltreated beast of burden that passes from owner to owner.

24

Racial tensions reach boiling point in Spike Lee’s incandescent portrait of a Brooklyn neighbourhood on the hottest day of the year.

23

Jacques Tati’s most painstaking accomplishment blends deft slapstick, endless visual ingenuity and sonic comedy in a stupendous modern satire.

=21

The first of Yasujirō Ozu’s great cycle of dramas that place the joys and sadnesses of family life in the context of a Japan disrupted by modernity.

=21

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s rapturous silent masterpiece, with soulful close-ups of Renée Jeanne “Maria” Falconetti’s tremulous martyr, transcending tyranny and temporality.

20

Akira Kurosawa’s monumental, scintillating tale of hired samurai protecting a peasant village: period thriller and moral/political fable in one.

19

Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War blowout, a hell-trip through the smoke and dazzle of imperial America’s most grandstanding rogue show.

18

Any sense of a conventional psychodrama is constantly disrupted by the experimental, improvisatory filmmaking.

17

The more ‘information’ we’re offered about the case, the more we come to realise that there are no easy answers to any of the questions being raised.

16

Had Californian sunlight ever looked as suggestive or sinister before the sharply etched dreamworld of Meshes of the Afternoon?

15

This poll’s last western standing, John Ford’s sweeping, stirring rescue-or-revenge quest remains a film of magnificent mystery and poetry.

14

In real time, Cléo becomes more real, more subject than object. She discards her whipped-cream wig and polka dots for a simple black shift. She performs less and feels more.

13

Huge-spirited and sharp-eyed, Jean Renoir’s French-society fresco gathers high classes and low for a weekend of country-house fallout.

12

The first of Francis Ford Coppola’s epic trilogy about the Corleone crime family is the disturbing story of a son drawn inexorably into his father’s Mafia affairs.

11

The first American film by one of German expressionism’s leading exponents, this lush, atmospheric silent drama is replete with groundbreaking cinematography.

10

Hollywood’s troubled transition from silent to talking pictures at the end of the 1920s provided the inspiration for perhaps the greatest of movie musicals.

9

Bottomless invention and frenetic, dizzying montage make this city symphony one of cinema’s sharpest, most exciting experiences nearly a century after its release.

8

Hollywood is dark and dangerous, yet alluring, in David Lynch’s acclaimed thriller.

7

Claire Denis’s great gift is to evoke emotion with gesture and juxtaposition. In the desert, water shimmers and ripples, naked shoulders perspire, black mosquito nets recall sheer lingerie.

6

Stanley Kubrick’s grand vision of mankind’s journey from its hominid beginnings to its star-child evolution is a towering achievement of science-fiction cinema.

5

Wong Kar Wai’s masterpiece is a heartbreaking story of illicit love that pulses with the ache of repressed desire.

4

Told in Yasujirō Ozu’s simple and elegant style, this story of intergenerational discord is heartbreaking and deeply human.

3

Famously sitting at the top of the Sight and Sound poll from 1962 to 2002, Orson Welles’s masterful debut, about newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, remains an enduring classic.

2

A former detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a woman apparently possessed by the past, in Alfred Hitchcock’s timeless thriller about obsession.

1

A magnificent epic of experimental cinema offering a feminist perspective on recurrent events of everyday life.